Canonicity as a social structure

The challenge for a new text, then, is to achieve canonical authority; and it is of course in the interest of any text which is on its way to achieving canonical status to further emphasize the selective, authoritative status of the canon to which it has (successfully) aspired. The situation is not unlike that of the second generation of a family or social grouping that has successfully moved up a rung in the social ladder complaining about others also aspiring to some upward mobility This is well documented in the jāti system, where a particular jāti that has recently re-determined itself in the hierarchy or the ritual hierarchy of food and water exchanges may well be especially hostile to other jātis who had been their near peers. D.Quigley, discussing the complex category of the Newar

writes

are endlessly fragmented. There is continual dispute about whether particular families, or particular lineages, merit the status of

at all, and among those that do, what ‘quality’ of they Remaking Buddhism for Medieval Nepal 86

are—aristocratic, commoner, nouveau-arrivé, fallen, or pretender.

(Quigley 1995:80)

Certainly the accusation of ‘pretender’ is constitutive of the category of canon; without it, no text would fail to be canonical.

Can this analogy between a social grouping and a book be usefully extended? While a text is not comprised of persons in the way a jāti is, nonetheless it is a cognitive structure which is constituted and prospers through similar social processes: ascription of status by self, by allied groups, and by outsiders; by attracting patronage, such as being copied out or inserted into recitation rituals; and by actions which confer status by implication, such as being cited in an important compendium, or becoming the object of the particular devotion of a powerful royal or religious figure. In a more abstract sense, the logical relation between ‘manuscript’ and ‘book’ is rather similar to that between a person and their jāti, for however faulty any one manuscript may be in its textual transmission, if it is recognized as a valid copy of its exemplar, then it acquires the right to be used in any ritual where any other manuscript of the same work can be used.

Viewed in this light, the existence of rituals which ‘finish’ the copying out of a manuscript makes considerable sense. In fact, among the Newar Buddhists there is a ritual akin to the ritual used on sacred icons and figures, but specifically for manuscripts. In theory it can only be used on manuscripts of books in the closed set of the Nine Dharmas. I have, however, seen manuscripts of Vajrayāna tantras not in that list which have had this ritual quickening performed upon them.

In any case, it is clear that attaining canonical status is not simply a scholars’ game in which the text is a movable but passive piece. Claims of ritual suitability within a text, such as those in the KV and GKV; ritual employment of a text; the patronage of important figures; and accusations of pretension and apocryphal status are part of a social dynamic of legitimation which confers (or denies) membership in a more or less closed canon, a canon itself constituted precisely through this fractious process repeated over and over again for different texts. The authority which comes with successfully attaining recognition as canonical within some sufficiently large social sphere is also constituted in this way, as a kind of institutional authority

Authority?

We might then ask what is meant by authority here. No nirukti can help us, for at least in Indian religious literature one of the surest signs of an authoritative text is the denial of the existence of its author. The Vedas are the prime example, but the entire tradition of śāstric argument through commentary depends on suppressing the writer’s own presence in order to win authority for his arguments, often at the expense of the apparent intended meaning of the text which forms an excuse for the commentary. Certainly none of the Mahāyāna sūtras which concern us here have, or want to have, an identifiable historical author. This is also a general feature of Sanskrit Buddhist scholastic literature: root texts by famous human authors attracted falsely attributed commentaries and commentaries attributed to the author of the original text. Examples include the Bhavya commentary to Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamādhyamika and the supposed auto commentary of Atīśa on his Bodhipathapradīpa. Yet the earliest Buddhist literature should ideally be the speech

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of Śākyamuni Buddha. Subsequent sūtras, and especially the Mahāyāna literature, sought to be recognized as buddhavacana, the words of (a/the) Buddha, and arguably for Buddhist texts that is the best emic definition of ‘authoritative’: buddhavacana. Because there was innovation and change in the religion, and new texts were written, a body of theory developed within Buddhism that was concerned precisely with the authority of narratives, theoretical statements and whole texts.² This does not, however, help us understand how authority is achieved, ascribed or maintained in an individual text or genre. I will return to look at how textual authority is achieved by the GKV below, but it is clear that one crucial link between authoritative institutions and the perception of authority in Buddhism is lineage. Successfully asserting membership in a lineage tradition stretching back to a Buddha is the same as showing the continuity of śāsana.

This is the function of the opening passage of so many Mahāyāna sūtras: first there is the mayā śrutam, “thus I have heard”, followed by an inevitable exercise in setting the stage. A Buddha, often Śākyamuni, was teaching in such and such a place, surrounded by (1) great numbers of divine and semi divine figures, (2) members of the fourfold

and (3) Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The last reinforces the authority established by the fact that it is a Buddha teaching; the middle locates the reader/listener; and the first lends majesty and may demonstrate patronage from the wealthy or powerful.

As Collins and others see authority as derived from canonical status, it will be useful to consider the distinction between institutional and charismatic authority Authority derived from a canon is clearly institutional authority and to the extent that a text wishes to derive authority from membership in some canon, it will of course also wish to emphasize the authoritative nature of that canon. So far, this follows the model I have proposed just above. The Indic tradition does not usually put forward the other sort of claim to authority, at least in its texts. The denial of authorship in the Vedic tradition, or the constant reversion to buddhavacana in the Buddhist, are denials of charisma; real skill lies in submerging one’s own identity so successfully that only the tradition, albeit perhaps suitably reinterpreted, remains. Where śāsana refers to lineage rather than to tradition, there is room for a sense of charisma; but this claim to charismatic authority would have been made outside the written text, in the ritualized transmission of the text for study and teaching.

Great traditions

Collins links the existence of at least an open canon to the notion of a Great Tradition.

Brinkhaus,³ too, invoked the notion of a Great Tradition in his study of the SvP; but while this concept as originally elaborated by the Chicago school was intended to be useful cross-culturally, in its present form (and limitations) it is closely tied to studies of the Indian subcontinent and especially the tension between Sanskrit and vernacular cultures.

In fact it is more fruitful to consider canonicity among the textual religions worldwide. A tense geometry of revelation, tradition, authority and translation also occurs, for example, in the case of The Cloud of Unknowing, a renaissance English visionary tract which sought to pass itself off as a translation from Greek of an otherwise unknown work of the late Hellenistic Christian Neoplatonist, Dionysius the Areopagite.

The ideal of closure (and its correlate, apocrypha) is equally evident on the world stage. Mani, the founder and root prophet of Manichaeism, specified precisely which

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eight works were to form the canon for his religion—seven written texts and a book of his paintings, showing that religious canonicity is not limited to texts. Nonetheless Manichaeism developed the extremely effective strategy in Central and East Asia of promulgating itself through written texts which looked very much as though they belonged to other religions. These apocryphal works, insofar as they succeeded to canonical status in the host religion, subverted the traditions into which they had been accepted. A good example of this pattern is the 8^th-century Chinese Compendium of the Doctrines and Styles of the Teaching of Mani, the Buddha of Light edited in Haloun and Henning (1952). The Manichaeans also directed their syncretic tactics towards Taoism;

there is evidence from the 12^th century both for purges directed against Taoist-Manichaean syncretic cults and texts, and for the survival of such cults. For a canon struggling towards ideal closure, even apocrypha may be systematized and set into a fixed relation with the canon, as witness the canonified apocrypha included in some editions of the Christian Bible.

Oral/written/printed

Collins sets aside the question of whether a canon is oral or written. An oral canon and a written canon are not the same. The distinction between oral and written, as we shall see, conditions the style and form of the content of scriptural materials. The kinds of institution required for the simple transmission of texts, the means of achieving authority and the ways in which closure can be enforced all differ significantly, so much so that the very notion of closure is different depending on whether the canon is written or oral. This is the point of Richard Gombrich’s essay on possible origins of the Mahāyāna (Gombrich 1990a): the advent of writing as a means of preserving the (canonical) scriptures meant the rigorous error-correction systems required to maintain an oral closed canon were lost, offering an opportunity for the insertion of new passages, and indeed, whole apocrypha.

While Gombrich’s (1990b) remarks about the unimportance of metre as a marker of canonicity in oral scripture are exceedingly useful, they are less so for the Mahāyāna.

Gombrich notes that

Since there were religious texts being preserved in the Buddha’s environment in both prose and verse, there seems to be no a priori ground for holding that Buddhist prose must be older than Buddhist verse or vice versa. (p. 8)

However, it is still a widely held hypothesis that the metric portions of the early

Mahāyāna texts, such as the or the are

usually older than their prose paraphrases. As we have already seen, too wide an application of this principle by Victorian scholars led to the false belief that the GKV was older than the KV. This belief, or some similar belief awarding priority to verse texts, was apparently also current within the community which compiled the KV, leading to the claim that it was in four-part verses.⁴ Thus by the time of the composition of the later Mahāyāna scriptures, about the 4^th century of the common era, simply being in verse had become a recognized indicator of canonical authority. Was this belief part of a larger claim that all the canonical materials had originally been in verse? Probably not; the

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Buddhist scholars of the Gupta period would have been just as capable of recognizing that much of the oldest material is prose. Yet Gombrich’s concept of error-correcting systems provides a reason why the compilers of the KV might have thought a verse text more authentic: the defenders of a verse text could claim that it was less prone to modification. So far as I know, however, there are no known instances of more recent Buddhist texts being composed in deliberately archaic metres.

Printing

The distinction between printed book and manuscript is as important for an historical understanding of canon formation as the more often discussed divide between oral and written. Although there was no significant indigenous print industry or technology in Nepal before the 20^th century, printing in Tibet and China became fundamental to the constitution and control of any canon between the 10^th and 15^th centuries.⁵ The development of xylograph printing ensured that a standard book or series of books could be produced again and again. Certainly the realization of a canon in Tibet, or rather, one of the various acts of composing and promulgating a version of the canon, included the drawing up of a catalogue (the dKar.chag) as well as the carving of the blocks from which prints of the canon were drawn. In fact, the catalogue does not always adequately describe (or successfully prescribe) the contents of a printed canon.⁶ Outside of the Buddhist tradition one need only consider the close and highly political bond between the Protestant Reformation and the development and use of printing technology. The fragility of a written tradition is apparent, too, in the loss of most of the Indian Syriac Christian textual tradition. This was destroyed by the Portuguese Catholics in the first years of renewed contact between the Malabar and Roman traditions; the existence of a liturgy which could possibly compete with the Latin for authority was intolerable.⁷

Of course, the print/manuscript divide emerges well after the closure of the Pāli canon or the advent of the Mahāyāna scriptures. Nonetheless, a comparison between the three distinct means of preserving canonical materials suggests that the strict closure which was required in order to preserve an oral canon, on the one hand, and the de facto standardization afforded by master plates or blocks in a printed canon, on the other, hold a much less easily fixed written medium between them. While the disputants arguing about Buddhist canonicity all concede that the Indian Buddhist canon was less closed, it is usually assumed that this is due to a lack of central authority. In fact, among the three historical stages of oral, written and printed, the oral and printed stages lend themselves to control mechanisms or at least to standardization far better than a tradition depending on tens of thousands of scribes and individual acts of manuscript recopying.⁸

As it happens, a printed canon is only just now developing among the Newar Buddhists. There are, as mentioned above, a handful of systematic programmes to produce easily accessible editions of the major Buddhist scriptures in the vernacular Newari or Nepali. The historical context for this development is too complex to consider here, but it is closely dependent on the ideology of vernacular printing and Protestantism which the Mahābodhi Society embodies.⁹ While these developments are far later than the period of this study, it is some sort of confirmation of the status of the GKV that it has been printed, along with much of the navagrantha and the BCA, but the KV has not yet been translated into Newari or printed.

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